Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* if trials took place on the Internet or around a dining room table, this would seem to be a pretty damning development in Steve Kelley's ongoing case against former employer Union-Tribune regarding a syndicated strip project he was putting together with the paper's current cartoonist Steve Breen. I wonder if it will have enough legal traction at this point in the case to be a difference-maker.

* people really need to stop interviewing the writer Paul Cornell so that his now-completed Captain Britain series can fall to a price point at my comics shop that better facilitates my purchasing it.

* not comics: I guess this is the last word as it stands on Editor & Publisher, which sends off its potential last issue January 4. It's hard for me to think there isn't a market for a magazine about publishing in some form, and I'm guessing this is one of those situations where the market has simply shrunk past the historical infrastructure for this publication.

* I'm going to leave further analysis of these numbers to Bart Beaty, who usually tackles them in a column, but it looks like comics production for the French-language market has stabilized title-wise after years of thunderous growth. As Bart tends to point out, the great swell of titles published is a huge issue for that market for a variety of reasons, including the fact that this puts a lot of pressure on titles to make an immediate impression or be pulled back out to seas by the force of the very next wave of books.

* not comics: kudos to MediaBistro.com's Galleycat blog for pressing Amazon.com on its definition of what a "sale" means for an e-book. There's so much weak rhetoric from the traditional book publishing industry's side of things on the issue of digital books, mostly around the issue of price points, that it's nice to be reminded that an agency advocating for digital publication can use misleading language and potentially even employ a self-handicapping policy.

* Telio Navega sent along this link that takes you to a blog with a posting called "As melhores HQs de 2009," (my attempts to find a direct link without registration failed). That contains a critical round-up of best Brazilian comics, 2009. Based on number of votes received out of a potential 15 total critics participating, the Top 11 are:

Please go to the original posting for a bunch of titles as selected by the participating critics and a ton of links to the books themselves.

* finally, it looks like Dupuis has released a book of conversations between the late photographer Didier Lefevre and the cartoonist Emmanuel Guibert, whose acquaintanceship led to a friendship and made possible the award-winning book The Photographer.